Today we have a slightly different, and I hope very interesting post, all about eBay Snipers!

For those of you who have never come across the term before, what exactly are “snipers”? No, it’s nothing to do with war or police – snipers are tools that allow you to bid on eBay auctions at the very last possible moment.

And that’s actually where the term “sniping” comes from, when you steal an item with a last second bid.

The process is extremely simple, once you’ve registered an account with one of the many eBay snipers online all you have to do is enter the item number of the auction you’re interested in, set your maximum bid and the sniper will take care of the rest! It really couldn’t be easier.

“But why!?” I hear you asking… Isn’t is easier to just set your bid and leave it – after all that is the whole point of how auctions work on eBay?

Yes technically that is true but in practice there are some clear disadvantages to bidding for items in the conventional way:

1) If an auction has no bids you don’t want to be the first! Herd/sheep mentality is strong on eBay so an auction with no bids makes people think something is wrong. It’s best to leave it like that and swoop in at the last second when there’s no competition for the item.

2) Many people DO NOT set a maximum bid as you’d expect. Instead they bid a certain amount and see if they’re beaten, and then they might bid more. This sniping method doesn’t give them the chance to do so, meaning you win more auctions and at cheaper prices.

3) Bidding wars! Bidding wars are great when you’re selling an item, but not when you’re buying! Once again the sniping method removes this worry as there simply isn’t time for other bidders to react.

4) Human error – how many times have you added an item to your watchlist with the intention of bidding on it but then completely missed the end of the auction? And how annoying is it when you later check and see that the item went for peanuts, and you’ve now lost out on some easy profit…?

Or how many times have you set a max price and then bid more than that so you can win the item (the bidding war syndrome that I just mentioned). Sniping removes all of these human errors by automating the bidding process and that by itself would probably make it worthwhile for most people.

5) Shill biding. This is a much more specific benefit, and not something that I consider to be widespread on eBay, but snipers do also stop shill biding. This is when the seller (through another a friend’s account) bids on an item until they’re the high bid, therefore knowing what your max is, then retract those bids and then use yet another account to bid on the item again so that it reaches your maximum bid amount. With snipers they can’t do this of course, as your bid isn’t placed until seconds before the end of the auction.

So now that we’ve covered what eBay snipers are and the main benefits of using one, who exactly are they for?

For either of the above, then eBay snipers are an invaluable tool! Of course this isn’t an all-inclusive list and anyone who buys items from eBay would benefit from using a sniper, for all the reasons that we’ve just discussed.

But which sniper!? After all a quick search on Google for “eBay sniper UK” yields over 500,000 results so which of the many available options should you use? Well that’s what we’re going to find out today!

I have researched countless options and narrowed it down to three well-known and highly regarded sniping tools, and it’s time to put them to the test!

Now let me quickly point out that I’m not going to go through all the features and differences between each sniper. This is because they are all very similar and you can find all of that information easily on their websites anyway. What we’re interested in today is an actual real-life test, not copying and pasting their sales patter.

The only thing I will mention is pricing, as that’s obviously a very important factor.

For Auction Sniper, their charges are simple:

As you can see their fee is calculated in US Dollars, and not Pounds. On their site they note that all “foreign currency auctions will be converted to American dollars at the daily exchange rate before the 1.5% fee is determined.”

For simplicity’s sake, I suggest you just use 1GBP = 1.25USD.

You may be slightly surprised that this service costs anything at all? A lot of people I speak to expect snipers to be free, as it is a fairly simple tool at the end of the day.

But don’t fear as one of the next sniper tools that we’re testing is 100% free – so it’ll be interesting to see if our two paid options are better than the free alternative!

As already mentioned, Gixen is 100% free to use, with an unlimited number of snipes.

One quick point that I’d like to mention in regards to the free vs paid options: I had a problem when creating an account with Auction Sniper and it said my username was incorrect:

Knowing that it wasn’t, I clicked the Contact Support option to get it sorted out, but was greeted by this page:

I then tried to create an account on Gixen and got an error there as well (turns out it was because I had recently changed my eBay password) but in this case I was given the correct error message which actually solved my problem:

We’ll have to see how the sniping goes, but so far it’s not looking great for the paid Auction Sniper!

Last but not least in our showdown we have Goofbid. Goofbid isn’t only a sniper tool, but actually has a lot of Buyer Tools and Search Tools that are supposed to help you uncover bargains on eBay.

Of course the focus of today’s post is all about the sniper they offer, but if you want a full review of Goofbid and all the other search, buyer, and seller tools they provide, then please check out my post on it here.

Now previously Goofbid’s sniper was FREE to use (there was a premium option that included grouping) but sadly they recently made it so that you have to pay a monthly subscription. Yes, this does include some extras in comparison to the previously free sniping tool (such as grouping or importing your eBay watchlist) but it costs £2.99 a month, which while obviously not a huge amount is fairly expensive for something that used to cost nothing at all…

Now let’s quickly compare Goofbid’s £2.99 a month fee to Auction Sniper’s “commission” model of 1.5% of the item’s price on winning snipes.

So £2.99 in fees would work out at roughly £200 in winning snipes using Auction Sniper. That means if you snipe less than £200 worth of items a month, Auction Sniper would work out cheaper – more than £200 a month and Goofbid will work out cheaper.

And there we go, those are the 3 contestants in today’s showdown – Auction Sniper vs Gixen vs Goofbid.

I’m going to test each sniper individually and then pit them head to head in the ultimate eBay sniper battle by bidding on one item using all three snipers!

Let’s get to the results!

First up is Auction Sniper, and after creating an account their site is very easy to use and quite well designed. The sniping process itself is extremely easy – you just enter the item number (copy and paste it from the eBay listing), your max bid, and the lead time (how long before the auction ends that you want your bid to be placed), which I left at 3 seconds.

The first snipe that I set up, for an A Walk Among the Tombstones Blu-ray, lost but everything seemed to have worked fine.

My maximum bid did register, without me having to do anything, but someone else happened to bid more:

This is probably a good time to point out that the items I’m bidding on are for the most part completely random. I am NOT looking for bargains or things that can be resold for a profit so please bear that in mind – this is just a test of the snipers.

To continue the test of Auction Sniper, I set up a second snipe, this time for a Man of Steel Blu-ray that had a starting price of £2.80 and no bids.

This time I won the item, being the only bidder! 🙂

Comparing the bid times to the auction end times, I can see that my first bid was placed exactly 4 seconds before the end of the auction, so not quite the claimed 3 seconds but close enough! However the winning bid was placed 7 seconds before the end of the auction, which is more than two times longer than it should have been…

You may think I am nitpicking needlessly here but at the end of the day these tools are all about their accuracy and 7 seconds is probably enough time for another bidder to manually react, defeating the whole purpose of using a sniper!

Considering the fact that it did at least place the bids and the first one was only a second out, I will give Auction Sniper a pass, but I am not overly enthused with the results, especially as it’s not a free tool.

Next up is Gixen and I’m now very interested to see how the accuracy of this free option compares to its paid-for competitors. I do want to quickly point out that Gixen does offer a premium option – Gixen Mirror, which costs $6 a year.

Gixen Mirror promises fault-free sniping – yes that’s right, they’re claiming 100% reliability which is very impressive. This is apparently managed by using two different servers to place every snipe, so if one fails there’s still a back up.

As well as this, you use get some additional features, such as more control over group bidding and the ability to set the snipe time (from 3-15 seconds). For the free service this is set at 6 seconds but other than that the sniping process is exactly the same, so the review applies either way.

Gixen’s site is really built around simplicity and is incredibly easy to use. Yes, it’s not the prettiest design but for ease of use it’s very well made, right from the log in (which just uses your eBay details, so you don’t need to create another account) to the actually sniping set up, which asks for the item number, your max bid, and lastly if you want to “group” it.

Grouping is actually a very useful tool, as it allows you to set snipes for multiple items when you only want to win one of them. Let’s say I am sourcing a specific PS4 game that usually sells for £15+. I set up snipes for 15 upcoming auctions at £10, and put them all into Group A. As soon as I win one of those auctions, the others will be cancelled so I don’t end up with multiples of the same item that I didn’t want.

Simple but very effective and I’m surprised that I didn’t see any mention of this or a similar feature at Auction Sniper!

On to the actual snipes and once again I lost my first one, a Game of Thrones Blu-ray and won my second, a Blu-ray of The Omen.

I’m happy to report that the bids were placed exactly 3 seconds before the auction end time!

So a pass for Gixen as well, with special mention to the overall simplicity and ease of use.

Last up we have Goofbid and my initial impressions are fairly positive – the design of the site is excellent (clean and professional and without the obtrusive adverts that plagued Gixen somewhat) and the process of setting up a snipe was very easy.

On this occasion it was first time lucky as my snipe for a Batman Blu-ray steelbook won, beating out another bidder by 50p.

.

And as you can see from the above screenshots, the time of my bid was exactly 3 seconds before the auction’s end time, so I’m confident in the accuracy of Goofbid.

Overall, there was nothing at all that went wrong with the actual snipe itself, so that means 3/3 and another pass for Goofbid.

HOWEVER – I do have a big complaint about Goofbid regarding transparency. If you go to their homepage, it appears as though the auction sniper is free and just has an option of a professional package if you want the extra features.

There is literally no mention of a subscription being required to use the basic sniper until the very last second when you’re actually trying to place your snipe!

In my opinion this is very misleading. There is nothing wrong with the tool not being free but that needs to be mentioned upfront – instead it’s presented as a free vs professional option which isn’t actually the case.

But moving on… as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I wanted to pit all three snipers against each other for the final test, and to do this I wanted to find a product that nobody has bid on – to keep things simple and easy.

Thankfully this wasn’t a hard task as I came across this item, sitting with no bids at a £0.99 start price and just under 8 minutes remaining:

With much pain I placed my bid (a £2 max) and left the auction to finish, eagerly watching to see who would come out on top.

Unfortunately the result was very anti-climatic, with all 3 snipers claiming they won the item!

After some investigating I found out this is just due to how these sniping tools work, by actually logging in and placing the bid for you – so all three registered the bid as being placed…

Which means I am now needlessly the owner of a Never Say Never Blu-ray. The things I do for my blog readers! 🙂

But this actually does bring me to an important issue, and something that I did want to bring up in today’s post. So far we’ve covered all the benefits of using a sniper; how they can make things easier for you, and most importantly how they can make you more profitable.

So it wouldn’t really be fair if I didn’t mention some of the negatives, and our failed final test actually illustrates one of these points perfectly – you have to give full access to your eBay account to the sniper.

Yes, that’s how it works – they need both your eBay username and password to be able to place these bids. Of course it isn’t an individual on the other side, this is all automated, but I can completely understand if this makes some of you feel uncomfortable, as I myself never like to give access to my eBay account to others.

Though having said that, I haven’t really come across any mention of things going wrong in that way from using eBay snipers and the three we’ve covered today are all highly regarded and reputable services.

And really that brings us to the end of today’s post and our final question – which of these three snipers do I recommend?

Well let’s go through them one by one.

I can start off by eliminating Auction Sniper, for 3 main reasons:

Problems with creating an account

Inaccurate bid times

Cost

Point no. 1 I can easily overlook, point no. 2 is not ideal but wouldn’t have been a deal breaker if other factors had made up for it. But my main issue is I don’t see anything to justify paying for this service when comparing it to the other options. Maybe if I used them extensively I would start to notice some worthwhile differences but at this point I just don’t and Auction Sniper actually performed worse than the free option Gixen…

Which leaves us Gixen and Goofbid and overall I would say it’s a tie in terms of the actual sniping process tool. They both did their jobs as advertised, they were easy to use, all snipes were editable and cancellable, they both kept a record of lost snipes, won snipes, and upcoming snipes, the bids were placed to within a second of accuracy etc. They just worked!

Gixen wins out on simplicity and ease of use but Goofbid has a nicer design and some people might find the ads on Gixen too obtrusive.

However, Gixen is FREE! Goofbid costs £2.99 a month and quite frankly, even if they were both free I would give a slight preference to Gixen, so it’s an easy decision:

WINNER – GIXEN.

And there you have it – Gixen is my current recommendation for the best free eBay auction sniper!

I hope you found this post useful and for those of you who hadn’t previously heard of snipers, I hope this gives you something to consider as we all know how important sourcing is in any business!

Using a sniper should allow you to buy your products more efficiently and for less and that just means more money in your pocket at the end of the day. It’s as simple as that.

As always if you have any questions or just want my advice on anything mentioned in this post, then please don’t hesitate to post below in the comments section and I’ll personally get back to you within 24 hours, Monday-Friday.

Thanks for very informative trial, but in reality there can be three or more bidders using sniping software on the same item, what make one of them win, and not the others would have been a good test,
thanks again
Harry.

When I was looking around for this type of information I was suprised to (not) find that anybody had made a review by pitting the different tools against eachother in a bidding war. Would be easy enough to set up with different e-bay accounts. Naturally you would also be the seller. Have you seen anything like that?

just lost to a sniping tool even though I had a Max bid much larger. So the sniping tool sneaks in there before the last second and I guess negates the high bid that I had set. Thanks for this post. I will get me a one of these.

Hi, sniping tools won’t “negate” larger maximum bids, but a machine, usually is capable of placing with more accurate timing – if your larger bid isn’t accepted by eBay before the auction ends then your out of luck. Snipers dont do anything that a person can’t do, at least hypothetically..I have a lot of experience placing last moment bids and most of the time Im confident I can beat the machines 3 second limit – but I can’t drop last second bids on several items at once, or even one item if I can’t get to my computer OR can’t ( at that critical moment) log on because of a puter or power glitch….and THATS where the bid snipers become very useful.

I just returned to use Gixen tonight to find out they no longer use your ebay sign in. I downloaded the new program exe but haven’t been able to set it up. You may have better luck. Thanks for the helpful review.

However… What would make them better is if you removed the social buttons on the left hand side which obscure the first words of each sentence in the text on my laptop. I have had to dodge them all the way down the page to read your words.

I’ve used Auction Sniper for a while but wasn’t aware the fixed fee for xx snipes had been replaced by % fee until I recently had a winning bid and was charged. Could have been my fault for missing a notification, not sure. That motivated me to look at what else was available and I found this article. It’s very well researched and compiled, saving me a lot of time so thanks very much.

Just found you! I was looking for a sniping service. Very helpful article. Goofbid turned me off about being misleading as one is getting started…
Was wondering if Gixen is still your favorite in 2017 ?

Very useful article thanks. I kind of don’t want to know when Gixen came about – since I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on AuctionSniper over the years! Those 1% can add up but also it’s the 20c minimum when I win lots of things for 99p I find eroded my balance. So I’m trying out Gixen for free, but planning to upgrade to Mirror if I like it – $6 a year seems very fair worth it for no ads too – and I can fund it by closing my AS account and getting a balance refund 🙂 I already submitted a request and I’ll let you know if leaving’s made difficult by them…

I’ve used Gixen for a few years, but when I tried recently, it kept throwing errors and missed my last minute bid. There are a lot of posts in the forums which claim that Ebay now blocks the sniper programs, requiring additional authentication that the snipers can’t give.

Oh, should have read your comment before posting mine above! So did you find this with all Sniper programs or only used Gixen since you had issues? I ask because I’ve just cancelled a ton of AS snipes (which were working fine to be fair, more than 99% strike rate) and manually uploaded them to GIXEN! Hoping I don’t miss out, almost wondering whether to submit them using both – but then I wouldn’t know which site won would I? Any ideas Andrew too?

Andrew, this is a good article. I’ll add another sniping tool that in my opinion matches Gixen in effectiveness. I’ve been using the free server-side/web version of “myibidder.com” for about 7 years now and it’s been great. Myibidder is completely free, doesn’t have annoying ads, has the same “Groups” feature you referenced where you can bid on multiple items of the same thing and the software will only purchase one (or however many you specify). I love it, and it has sniped many successful eBay auctions for me since I started using it years ago. Give it a look at http://www.myibidder.com.

Hi Andrew,
I used a Gixen before,but lately he started not placing a bids for me,lots of times i have lost.
Then i went for goofbid and it works well for me,so far no issues,have to say i snipe a lot every day.

Looking further into both Gixen and Goofbid sites, I see Gixen’s default bid time is now stated as 6sec (only 3sec if you buy “Gixen-Mirror” for $6 annually) and 2sec for (Paid) Goofbid. That could be an important 6 seconds allowing someone else to bid manually.
I think I will upgrade to Gixen Mirror.

Do you know what Gixen’s “Performance rate is? Goofbid claim 99.99% i.e. have you ever lost bids through yours not being entered in time?

Thank you for the very interesting and useful review. There is an important update that you may wish to add to your blog. That is that Goofbid have withdrawn their free service. Apparently this is due to not having enough income to make the free service economic. Fair enough but it does mean that while Goofbid is an effective and reliable bidding robot it now coses £2.99 per month which is not the best choice for a paid service. Its fine for a buyer who places many bids but for the occasional user it makes it too pricey. I think they would have done better by analysing their customer purchaing data and setting a % commission for placing a successful bid which would balance the needs of both the frequent and occasional user.

Just signed up for GoofBid and after all the sign up effort it says its is no longer free and
“We understand this represents a significant change and should you have any further questions, feel free to contact me directly at contact@goofbid.com ”

And to make matters worth the email is invalid!!

Don’t waste your time with GoofBid if you want to try sniping for free

Thanks for a great article Andrew, just for info. goofbid has now turned into a pay service it seems, a pity because I have used it for a number of years so I will start using Gixen and see if it’s as good as goofbid was.

One small difference between Gixen and Goofbid: group bidding (so that you can place several bids on similar items, but when one succeeds the rest are cancelled) is an option for Premium (paid) users of Goofbid; according to this article it is free on Gixen. That said, I use Goofbid, and it has been very successful. I quite often get an email saying “Please confirm your snipe item by clicking the button below”; but on most (maybe all, I don’t remember) occasions when I’ve not responded, the bid seems to have been made anyway.

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain sniping, test the free apps and share this valuable information with folks like me who are so frustrated with being on the losing end of those bidding situations. So many times sitting by the computer, waiting for the last few minutes, placing the only bid on the item, then losing it in the last few seconds with no recourse. Arrrrgggghhhhh!!!!!!! Hate, hate, hate it!
I hope I can make the transition from hating to being the one hated. I’ll learn to live with the hate. ?

Hi Andrew. I just stopped by here somewhat randomly and decided to comment to give you a bit of support. I’ve won about 5,000 auctions over 10 years or so using Gixen. I like the app for the same reasons you do, and I use AdBlock so I don’t even see the ads that you mentioned as a slight negative. Occasionally – but rarely – there have been glitches when eBay updates their site, causing Gixen to have to update their software and thus not being able to execute my snipes for, say, a day. But that’s a reasonable event, and I don’t get bent out of shape when it happens. Thanks for your review.

I have used Gixen four times now and i have not lost an auction yet. I haven’t tried the other snipers, but considering my success with Gixen i think I will stay where i am at. Thanks for the good review and research.

i used to use Goofbid but now they are offering a premium service that lets you see other goofbid snipers that are set on your item of choice, effectively meaning if you dont pay then anyone on goofbid who has will be able to set their snipe higher. Gixen is now my choice.
John

Thanks. I always manually snipe in the last few seconds. I am considering a sniping tool because sometimes say my internet connection drops out or eBay does a weird time me out thing Etc right when I’m about to place my bid. Because I leave it to the last seconds there’s no room for errors or glitches. I’ve wondered how reliable snipe tools are regarding maintaining their own connection. Have you come across such as sniper server drop outs at unfortunate moments?
Cheers

There used to be a program, Buyertools Reminder, that did all these things very successfully without needing to reveal login credentials. It supported group bidding. Of course, it depended upon the reliability of your Internet connection. Now and again it failed for a while when eBay changed its layout and the program was not updated fast enough (the sites reviewed here have the same risk).

Several years ago it stopped working, and no update was produced. The Web site still exists and allows download of the (now useless) program without comment, and I haven’t seen any mention of its being discontinued.

Does anybody have information about this? Just that it’s truly dead and gone, I suspect.

Thank you so much. I have been sniped three times on large quantities of upholstes/curtain fabric, probably by dealer. Ok, they have to make a living but on a small income we can’t afford even decent replacement furniture and it gets gutty to keep being sniped. Last time I deliberately went quite beyond what we could comfortably pay because I was sick of the same two bidders sniping me. I realised it was going to happen again so I deliberately drove up the price. Decided that if they won’t let a non-dealer get a look in i’d make them pay through the nose. One of them did. Served him right for being greedy and being ‘must have it all.’

Anyway, being a sniper for the fabric, playing them at their own game, is clearly the only way I stand a chance of being able to cover our now very shabby sofa and to make matching curtains. So a very genuine thank you 🙂

If you think anything on eBay is “secure” it’s time to wake up. They only use SSL for the authentication page. Everything else is sent in the clear, with no encryption at all. This means eBay is vulnerable to all kinds of MitM attacks and all of your search and bid history can be seen by anyone who can see your net traffic. eBay is an absolute joke when it comes to security and all third parties that use eBay are necessarily also insecure.

Gixen is a pain in the Azz . They changed there sign on format sometime back , where that change asks put in your original username which was your email address. Well that’s what I was using my email address because that’s what the sign up requirements were. . .Now it requires you to not use your email address as your username. I have tried to change this over and over again, I have contacted Mario 5X, and he can’t make it work. I’m so frustrated with Mario and gixen, and it’s ridiculous. And in fact , opposite of what he said, I at times have still been able to continue to use my email address 2 make it Work when it’s not supposed to…. but not every time. And in fact I just tried to do it now, and it wouldn’t work for me. Really I would have just like to follow Mario’s instructions like I did 5 times and have success. I’ve pleaded with him he tells me just to do this, I do it nothing. I’m off to goofbid. Good luck with your ships and if you used to have the original username is your email address. So frustrating.

Thanks for doing all that work. I am just about to sign up with Goofbid now. I was with Auction Sniper but my bids weren’t being placed, and there were all sorts of weird problems and it turned out that e-bay had hacked their account, so I went over to EZ Sniper and I just find that their site is totally unreliable which isn’t good enough for a service that isn’t cheap.
Leonie

I’m a long time Gixen user and a subscriber to their mirror service. I find them generally to be very good at placing the bids (all my snipes have gone through on time) but too often lately their website has been suffering from long spells of downtime. Although this doesn’t seem to affect the firing of the bids, it means you can’t view, edit or cancel your snipes. It seems to be a one-man operation so you just have to wait until he gets around to fixing the problem.

I may have to try one of these alternative services if the problems continue.

I’m looking for a good sniper tool to use on my Mac running Tiger. The system software is somwhat outdated but the last effective for PPC Macs. I am able to run the latest Firefox though, thanks to Cameron Kaiser who created TenFourFox for PPC. Google isn’t really helpful here.

Another negative about Auctionsniper. I have been using it for quite a while. Every once in a while it fails to place my bid. I am told it is some problem about logging in. I have lost some items that I really wanted because of this. They told me they are working on the problem, but apparently no solution has been found.

I have used Goofbid successfully for several months, but recently noticed a major flaw: I happen to have 2 different accounts with ebay, but signed up for Goofbid with only one account. However, a few times now Goofbid has placed bids for an item under BOTH my accounts, meaning that I actually ended up bidding against myself! For 2 items, there were only two bidders — both of them me, my different ebay IDs.

Agree with the above commenters, particularly Mike: your well-written article is just what I was looking for. I too am having problems with Auction Sniper (keeps thinking there’s a problem with some aspect of my e-bay account credentials, but offering no clue as to what it is) – and until reading your article I have to confess that I didn’t even realise the main alternatives were free of charge!

HI, I thought you might want to mention that eBay is cracking down on “website” type of auction snipers. they are asking for “captchas” when a bid comes in from a “different” device than is expected.

they also do not give you your eBay bucks, nor will they honor returns… also you are giving your password to a website that can be hacked, think “target” and “home depot”…

I believe the best alternative is a sniper app that lives on your desktop, where eBay has no problems with it coming from your “device” and honors everything including eBay bucks, and returns. and your password is confined to your desktop…

you should look for desktop apps for Mac and PC, as alternatives, I am using one for my Mac from the Mac app store that works great.

“I believe the best alternative is a sniper app that lives on your desktop, where eBay has no problems with it coming from your “device”

Though this might have been true at a previous time, now eBay is throwing a Captcha challenge to JBid auction sniping software, and the developers of JBid have not made any move to write a pass-through code which will allow logging in the account.

So at least in the case of JBid, the local sniping client software may not be the miracle cure we’d hope it might be.

I believe JBid, is an example of a Website server type of sniper, although they have an app, it is really just connecting you to the website server, there are pure desktop/iphone apps, but for the iPhone that type of app must be moved to the front and running during the auction (so it must be a purposed device, which is actually cheap now a days, if you buy an old iPhone for this purpose). otherwise it too must use a webserver.

I found this excellent page looking for an alternative to Auction Sniper. I used it and found it excellent until this summer, when quite at random it missed some key auctions while completing the next. I missed a couple of important items as a result, and have one I am keen to win tomorrow hence my interest in finding a new sniper and not risking Auction Sniper.

I dud try to contact Auction Sniper and sent screen shots of their less than useful support but no reply sent.

Hence I’d say AVOID AUCTION SNIPER at all costs, just not worth the risk if missing an item.

I started using Goofbid after purchasing your EAB Course, I have made decent money on undervalued items using your methods. I think Goofbid is fantastic and as you state Sniper is just one of it’s many features, it has late night finishing auctions and many other tools. Well worth a review and instructional post by you in my opinion.

Andrew,
thanks for the info. Here is what just happened to me:
EBays security system breach during last minutes of bidding on high end items: A third party, a hacker, used by a competing bidder was able to place a file onto my PC to manipulate the outcome of the bidding, change the contents of Ebay’s bidding screen, added content, logged me out during bidding, dis-allowed access to automatic bidding and toke over the bidding to benefit the competing bidder and secure a low price.
Microsoft Security Essentials found the file after the bidding and I send it to them. What is the name of this activity????

A bit more on this exploit. (I’m not an expert, I read it up just now.) It’s not connected in any way to sniping, in fact sniping can protect you against it! The eBay Web site has a vulnerability which allows this: a crooked eBay seller’s listing page can ask a user to agree to install a program, maybe apparently in the name of eBay, maybe offering a discount. As far as I understand it, the malware can then do ANYTHING; it isn’t restricted to eBay activities. In particular, eBay password is compromised and should be changed, plus I would recommend detailed virus cleanup.

Be wary of special offers or requests to install anything; a sniper site or program should not be vulnerable.